What is “America?”

It was brought up in conversation that, at the founding of this country, most of the people were not in favor of independence. That is why the founders needed a declaration stating that we were being abused by the king. Thomas Jefferson did a really good job writing and the public were swayed to the cause. Oddly enough, that was true democracy in action. It must have scare them to death because when the time came to write the Constitution, they went out of their way to make sure “We the People” didn’t have the final word of governing ourselves.

History is rife with examples where the people were swayed by one silver-tongued devil or another. Adolf Hitler comes to mind. He could mesmerize a crowd like a Madonna video.

Karl Marx still has people who believe what he wrote, in spite of the fact that since the 1880’s when it was finished, it has never worked without force.

 That’s the scary thing about leadership. As a cynical friend said, “All you need to be a leader is followers.”

Today the term “Follower” has a whole new breath of life. Because of social media, we are defined by who we follow. The only thing saving us from our sheep-like trance is the fact that, for every demi-god politician or pundit, there is an “influencer” that has influence over those that are easily influenced. Thus, fragmenting the populace to the point that nothing would ever get done except for the brilliant trick James Madison and the guys wrote into the Constitution. We elect people who, in turn make our decisions for us, building in a layer of protection for we, the people from we the people.

This is why, when I hear some blowhard say, “this is a threat to our democracy,” I say, “outstanding!”

We are not a democracy we are a republic with democratically held elections.

To clarify, if we were a democracy we would be governed by polls. Oh, Lord help us, we are a democracy!